in the first ten minutes of the day, and to dismiss the rest on their business.  He might, if necessary, have also picked a reserve jury, and selected the jury for the next day’s cases.  The law revels in expense, however and so a great number of middle-aged men were taken away for two whole days from their businesses and compelled to sit in filthy air and on benches that would not be endured in the gallery of a theatre, with nothing to do but watch the backs of the heads of a continuous procession of barristers and bigamists.

Few jurors would have complained, I think if there had been any rational excuse for detaining them.  What they objected to so bitterly was the fact that no use was made of them, and that they were kept there for two days, though it must have been obvious to everyone that the majority of them might as well he at home.  It may be, however, that there is some great purpose underlying the present system of calling together a crowd of unnecessary jurymen.  Perhaps it is a form of compulsory education for middle-aged men.  It shows them the machine of the law in action, and enables them to some extent to say from their own observation whether it is being worked in a fair and humane or in a harsh and vindictive spirit.  One cannot sit through one criminal case after another at the Assizes without gaining a considerable amount of material for forming a judgment on this matter.  The juror in waiting, as he sees a pregnant woman swooning in the dock or a man with a high, pumpkin-shaped back to his head led off down the dark stairs to five years’ penal servitude, becomes a keen critic of the British justice that may have been to him until then merely a phrase.  How does British justice emerge from the test?  Well, it may be that this judge was a particularly kind judge and that the policemen of this county are particularly kindly policemen, but I confess that, much as I detest other people’s boasting, I came away with the impression that the boast about British justice is justified.  I do not believe that it is by any means always justified in the mouths of statesmen who use it as an excuse for their own injustice, and I would not trust every judge or every jury to give a verdict free from political bias in a case that involved political issues.  But in the ordinary case—­“as between,” in the words of the oath, “our sovereign lord the King and the prisoner at the bar”—­it seems to me, if my two days’ experience can be taken as typical, that British justice is not only just but merciful.

The evidence is, perhaps, insufficient, as, in most cases, the sentences were deferred.  But what pleased one was the general lack of vindictiveness in the prosecution or in the police evidence.  Hardly a bigamist climbed into the dock—­and there was an apparently endless stream of them—­to whom the local police did not give a glowing certificate of character.  The chief constable of the county went into the witness-box to testify that one bigamist